I recently had a few conversations with the folks over at the Alliance for Climate Education in Oakland, CA regarding their plans to develop community of students engaged with climate change. Part of our discussion explored what an e-mail communication might look like to follow up on their presentations. In this post, I’ll share one the sketches I made and why sketched annotated wireframe sketches are helpful.

About The Alliance For Climate Education

The Alliance for Climate Education trains educators to go into schools and present the latest information of climate change. Think of it as bringing an Al Gore disciple into your school who knows all about what’s going on in your local community. One question is how to keep the relationships that these presenters form with the students going after the presentation is over.

The Challenge

As a young organization they’re still figuring out what needs students and teachers have and how they can provide a relevant service on an ongoing basis. Thus, the follow up e-mail exploration was used as an exercise to open up the opportunity space and explore possible post-presentation interactions in support of relationship development.

The Future E-mail Exercise

The stated goal of the e-mail campaign was to drive ongoing engagement with students. Following this, I starting thinking about how to transition the relationship with the presenter to someone in the student’s everyday life. In this case, that was a teacher at the school and/or the student’s parents. I also wanted to provide value for the students, so I included information about scholarships, local events, and photos from the presentation at the school. Here’s what the sketch looks like, you can click on it to see a larger version:

Ideally, sketches like these would be done by a cross-functional team and shared in a workshop setting. Quick sketches are a great way to quickly generate ideas, or even flush out concepts. You don’t have to be able to draw like a pro either, simple stick figures and boxes will do just fine. The lightweight nature of sketches also prevents sidetracking conversations about color, wording, and other details that are better suited to high-fidelity wireframes that are done later in the development process.

Results

The result of this kind of exercise is a collection of sketches that contain a set of ideas which can be collected and analyzed in support of strategy development and tactical implementation. In this case, my sketch started a series of conversations about the community that the organization was attempting to serve. My perspective was that there are already many organizations attempting to serve students directly and that the real opportunity space was to create tools for teachers, and student leaders, to organize students to engage in local projects. Based on this approach, the Alliance for Climate Change might explore providing tools to teachers such as e-mail templates, website templates, training, etc. It’ll be interesting to see which direction they end up taking.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more about wireframes, here’s a link to a great post by James Kelway entitled The what, when and why of wireframes.